David Rich has a very good, and very depressing article on Dieudonne and his kind:-

“Making common cause” between Holocaust deniers, neo-fascists, the pro-Palestinian left, and the revolutionary Islamists of Iran is precisely what Dieudonné has spent the past decade trying to achieve. Originally from the political left, he has moved via anti-Israel rhetoric and the fascist Front National (FN) to the establishment of his own Parti Anti Sioniste (PAS, or Anti-Zionist Party). Alongside him in the PAS is essayist and filmmaker Alain Soral, who underwent a similar journey from the Marxist left to the FN before finding a political home with Dieudonné.

There are not many political movements that can embrace the neo-fascist right, the anti-capitalist left, and Iranian revolutionary Islamism. Dieudonné is close to FN leaders—Jean Marie Le Pen is godfather to one of his children—while also attracting fans who consider themselves to be left-wing radicals. He was a guest in Tehran of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and received Iranian funding for a film project. Historically, movements that successfully pulled off this kind of balancing act have tended to rely on anti-Semitism as their glue, expressed through the lingua franca of conspiracist anti-Zionism, and PAS is no different.

Strikingly, for a party that calls itself anti-Zionist, PAS’s political program makes no direct mention of Israel or Palestine. This is parochial, patriotic anti-Zionism, in which Zionism is portrayed primarily as a subversive, corrupting presence in French society.

Radio 4’s The Report had the journalist Helen Grady interviewing Dieudonne’s friends and followers. Sometimes they said “Zionist” where they obviously meant “Jewish” and sometimes they said, “I’m not antisemitic but Jews run everything”. Also, Dieudonne gave them the thrill of saying, or just hinting at, the forbidden. – not just “you don’t say that” but “you can’t say that” because it’s illegal in a state with laws against Holocaust denial. This was interpreted as special treatment for Jews while other minorities are fair game.

I was sorry the reporter didn’t ask them to explain who these Zionists are and what are these utterances that are so dammed by the laws – not that I agree with Holocaust denial laws or anti free speech and expression laws in general. In fact I would like to know how much these laws exacerbate the sense of resentment that is one of the emotional bases of Fascism. Certainly breaking them, or hinting that you were, gave the audience a lovely outsider frisson.

Anti-Zionist and Anti-Establishment

Some of these gagged folk came from immigrant communities – their parents from North Africa say – and they had good words to say of the Front National – at least they’re honest when the rest are hypocrites.

It was your worst gibbering blog thread taking flesh, with hideous whiffs of the 1930s, in all their bizarre irrationality.

Rich concludes with a warning for those who think It Can’t Happen Here:-

. .it would be complacent to assume that Dieudonné’s anti-establishment appeal, expressed through angry, transgressive satire and political stunts, could not find a British audience. The personal followings of Nigel Farage MEP and George Galloway MP demonstrate the appetite in the UK for charismatic, populist anti-politics. .. A Francophone comic with a taste for the surreal is likely to have trouble finding a mass audience in Britain; but his populist anti-politics, carrying a coded anti-Semitism and transmitted via social media, may have better luck in finding an audience..

The anti-establishment comedian who thinks all political institutions are a waste of time is Russell Brand, but to do him justice, he is nothing like as malevolent as Dieudonne, and I can’t see him doing Holocaust jokes or chumming up with David Irving. I can’t see him getting in bed with UKIP either, which is the closest thing here to the Front National. I don’t keep up with popular culture, and there may be obvious candidates for the Dieudonne role that I’ve missed.

Respect was a party that pulled in some of the political groups that are attracted to Dieudonne:- the pro-Palestinian Left and Islamists, and no doubt Holocaust deniers would pop up in such a crowd. Gilad Atzmon would be the obvious entertainer, but he’s not a man of any great charisma or the popular touch. However, it’s hard to think of the neo-Fascist right finding a home there, and Respect is now mostly a fantasy in Galloway’s head.

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But France has a much longer and deeper tradition of anti-semitism than us as well as a history of warped political organisations that have spanned far left and far right – see Ze’ev Sternhell’s book Neither Right Nor Left for the years before and after WW1 for instance.

So both Dieudonné and the FN have a very old, very deep and very toxic well to draw upon.

Despise the British as you might we have no equivalent tradition and moreover an electoral system which very effectively marginalises any challenge to the three main parties.

And I’d say the nearest thing to an equivalent figure we have is Galloway who while willing to literally humiliate himself in almost anyway to get a mass audience has miserably failed and is unelectable outside of a couple of heavily Muslim constituencies (and may not be re-electable even there after they’ve had him ‘represent’ them for any time).

RosieBsaid,

I don’t despise the British people at all for the reasons you state. I agree with your points and as I tried to map the French situation on to the British one saw that it wouldn’t work. In fact my last two paragraphs pretty much say that it doesn’t work. Russell Brand doesn’t work. Galloway doesn’t work. Respect doesn’t work. So all credit to Britain. Rich’s prediction in the British scenario probably won’t come true.

I know you don’t – it was a rather silly rhetorical statement on my part and of course the ‘you’ should have been ‘we’ or ‘I’.

The ‘but’ was also poorly chosen as you do indeed talk precisely about the differences – so should have been an ‘and’.

What is interesting and again quite inconceivable in our political context is the shift involved on the part of the French right away from pure immigrant-bashing racism to what appears to be their own Beyond the Fragments strategy of identifying discontented segments of society wherever they are and forming them into some bizarre inverted rainbow coalition of their own.

How serious this actually is I can’t judge but it does say a lot about the far greater sophistication of the French right tradition compared to ours – thus my citing Sternhell on how that tradition successfully subsumed within it major elements of the socialist, communist and anarcho-syndicalist left in the past.

And is it possible that thanks to the left’s pathological anti-zionism we are seeing another similar re-alignment there now?

Our Neanderthaloid far right never having absorbed anything of the intellectual left into its DNA (Mosley was never either left-wing or intellectual enough to count) is obviously far less capable of the ideological gymnastics required.

I think part of the difference might also be that the French far-right doesn’t have a culture of dehumanising intellectuals, that being much less embedded in French society generally, so has been able to take from the intellectual left because it doesn’t think that being an intellectual is a) in itself bad and b) in itself inherently left-wing.

Whereas the British far-right, along with much of British society, *does* have a culture of dehumanising intellectuals, and while I normally think that is a bad thing, it might have accidentally good results by mistake in this case.

flyingrodentsaid,

Rich concludes with a warning for those who think It Can’t Happen Here…

These are good points and this entire situation is shocking and alarming, particularly in the 21st century. It leaves you torn between wanting to send in the riot police and the fear that this would only make it worse, or it does me anyway.

Mind you, I do have to point out that you don’t have to extrapolate outwards from chancers like Galloway or Farage in a great leap of imagination to find a theoretical UK equivalent of this kind of hateful, homegrown racist conspiracism.

Right here in Britain, we’ve had populist protest movements of ordinary people who have decided that their own government is engaged in a clandestine plot to install the laws and mores of an alien culture on their land; who detect in every declaration of revulsion at their yahoo racism the swarthy finger of the foreigner on the scales of justice, and who openly believe that they are being prevented from speaking the truth as they perceive it by a violent tyranny of political correctness, enforced by complicit and corrupt politicians.

In fact, this has bled right out into the mainstream, filling tabloids, TV and talk radio with all manner of “Now they’re taking over our (local amenity)” guff and “You can’t say anything for fear of offending Them” nonsense. There have been countless front-page headlines about it.

For real, in some parts of the country, it is happening here – it has happened here, for years.

All I know is this, that the Bolshevik jew murdered tens of millions of white Christian Russians. That the Revolution was financed by New York bankers; namely, Schiff and co. Trotsky sailed from Barcelona Christmas 1916, First Class; to pick the gold up from his friends and family in New York. Schiff had already weakened the Russian Fleet by loaning the Japanese 200 million dollars to finance the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. It was Holocaust Liars, all jews: Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman and Karski who invented this 6 million zyclon b nonsense. Lay off the jewish History Channel, Issac’s World at War, and Spielberg Hollywood propaganda. 90% of jews are not semites. If you want to corroborate these facts, please feel free to contact Danny Cohen Controller of BBC, and any of his co-religionists who own and monopolise the UK and US media. Shiraz Socialist please grow up for you are out of your depth.

I think, on balance, that Shiraz should leave Maleski’s comment in place (despite our usual policy of deleting outright racist and fascit comments), simply for the benefit of people (like quite a few Graun and New Statesman readers) who think anti-Semitism no longer exists and/or isn’t really all that dangerous these days.

RosieBsaid,

@Roger Carmody – it was Walter Bagehot who used to congratulate the English for their stupidity – which made their government stable and the people unlikely to follow extreme ideologies. Bit frustrating for many, I know.

“…underwent a similar journey from the Marxist left to the FN before finding a political home with Dieudonné.”

Not so much a “journey” as this would imply real progressive movement, from … to. More like the foldspace kind of journey, from/to while not budging an inch. Those are the absolutist purists who don’t care for labels, only principles.

About French vs. British antisemitism: I agree that there is a difference and it is an important one. Antisemitism is always a kick but in the case of Britain it is a bootless kick. Or in other words, not very effective, due I suspect mostly to the British innate idea of themselves as great believers in fair play. It was much more tolerable to be a Jew in the UK than a Jew in Europe or the Middle East. The last time there was a real kick in Britain was 1230 something. And even that was done somewhat reluctantly and the captain who caused the death of hundreds of Jews was tried and executed. It is alright to dislike Jews, but not to the point of mistreating or killing them. Jews appreciate this nuance, believe it or not.

The vast majority of jews are not semites! This is a fact. Talentless Holocaust Liar Russell Brand, a boring nobody who hankers to be somebody is given the red carpet treatment by BBC jewboy Danny Cohen and yet there is a comic genius out there called Dieudonne, who actually doesn’t grovel to the jewish media; and we, the British public are denied a chance to see him on TV. All we get from jewboy Danny Cohen in the obese UK, is cookery pogroms, dopey Russell Brand, kosher Joe brand and the ‘suviva’ Auschwitz (plucking, highly strung six lyre)orchestra. Give me a break!

The Ashkenazi jew ain’t semites. Jewboy BBC boss, Danny Cohen loves pushing the boundaries–fair enough. Well, let us talk about the jew and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Holocaust nonsense etc. Dieudonne does! He challenges the jewish narrative. Do you have any idea of how many White Russian Christians were butchered by the jew? Frenkel, Yaguda and Stalin’s brother in law Kaganovich and co. built up the Soviet Jewlags, where tens of millions of innocents perished. Dieudonne talks about Robert (Faurisson) who exposes Holocaust Liars. By the way: How many synagogues were demolished in the Bolshevik Soviet Union and Rabbis slaughtered during their Marxist Utopia. Around, 100,000+ Orthodox Priest were executed, plus 300+ Bishops. God only knows how many Churches were demolished by the jewish Bolsheviks. Dieudonne is a comic genius, not a clown; like look at me Holocaust Liar Russell Brand, I am a trendy giggling nobody and the jewish media adore me. Brand can ridicule Adolf Hitler, well that’s OK to me; but as far as I know ,the emotional word Holocaust , was first used big time; pre-dating Trotsky (Bronstein) by Karl Marx himself. Khmer Rouge style, he wanted rid of the: Highland Scots, Serbians, Basques etc. because as he said they were ‘racial trash’ ; two stages behind ‘Capitalist Society’ and this was in 1849! The jew is the, ‘Master of the Lie’. Dieudonne knows this full well! And he is good at his job.

dagmarsaid,

Maleski: are you practicing for some kind of sub-west-end farce, where you play an upper-middle-class wannabe aristocrat, complete with handlebar ‘tache and cigarette holder, maybe wearing a velvet jacket or a silk dressing gown? Or William Joyce’s doppelgänger? That’s the kind of voice I imagine when I read your rantings. “Butchered by ‘the Jew’. Haw haw. The ‘jewish Media’ The ‘Bronstein-Soviet Jewlags’. Haw Haw. Where’s my G&T? I have the Channel Islands to run”